Paradigm (9781909490406) (17 page)

‘Alice, Alice full of malice, came like a slum-dog into the palace. What makes you think I'm gonna listen to a girl like you?' he said. A broad grin revealed stumpy teeth and he rolled dead eyes back into his head. Alice straightened her back and ran a damp tongue around her dry mouth. In the absence of a pair of scissors, the words came from somewhere, but she wasn't sure where. With everything she had left inside her, she snarled at the boy.

‘The reason you're going to listen to me is because I know you. I might not know your name or where you come from or what your story is, but I know you. I know you and I know every boy like you. You were the boy on the bus who used to spit in the old lady's hair. You were the boy who used to wait in the tunnel and steal the busker's money. You were the boy in class who never listened then made out the teachers were no good. And then you were the boy who never learned to read and write properly. You were the boy who hurt my Charlie.

‘You were also the boy whose parents never gave a toss where he was at night, never took him to the dentist and left him on his own when they should have been taking care of him. You're going to listen to me because we're not that different me and you. Do you get it? You're going to listen to me because I know that if you weren't being that stupid little boy, you could be something else. And
here
, you can be. You don't have to be the poor boy who has to steal or sell drugs or rob old ladies or hurt people because
in here
, we're all the same.

‘In here, there are no cool trainers or rich parents or fancy schools. Or cricket or gaming machines or cheap lipstick. No gangs, no football and no drugs. For kids like you and me, in here is
better
. In here it's
equal
. We have got a chance.'

Alice exhaled like the last empty breaths of a balloon and heaved the startled boy off her, standing upright and strong and letting her hands flop by her sides. One solitary tear pooled in her right eye.

The room was silent except for the occasional sniff coming from the boy who stood opposite her, crumpling at the knees. Billie-Joe's jaw was slung open. They all stood there without speaking for what felt like an eternity. And then the boy began to cry.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Everyone, back to class.
NOW
!'

The shrill voice of Miss Kunstein rang through the canteen, shredding the silence like lettuce. The boy, his nose streaming, held out his hand to Jonah and pulled him up from the floor. Jonah looked at Alice with glowing eyes. They left in silence. Billie-Joe fled down the corridor towards her classroom and the rest followed her. The room was empty.

Miss Kunstein bent down and pulled out the tray with the remainder of the food on from under the table. She handed it to Alice.

‘Alice Davenport, you can stay here for a moment. You don't seem to have finished your lunch,' she said.

‘I'm not hungry any longer,' said Alice. ‘Can I go back to class?' She could feel the tiny red fingernail arcs spotting blood into her palms and she wiped them onto her trousers.

‘That was very, very brave,' said Miss Kunstein, handing her some tissue. Alice wasn't sure whether to dry her eyes, blow her nose or dab her palms so she did all three, in that order.

‘It's just the truth,' she said. ‘Things are better here for me than they were before. I eat better, I sleep better and I learn more. It's better for a lot of people. They just don't understand that yet.' Miss Kunstein put an arm around her shoulder.

‘I've been watching you,' she said. ‘If you continue with your studies the way you have been, I think you'll be destined for some great things here, Alice. Do you think you'd like to take on some responsibility on behalf of Paradigm Industries?'

Alice shrugged and nodded all at the same time and, as she did so, she felt the weight of the earth and the world and the stars melt from her shoulders and rise upwards to meet a cloud-shaped like the moon in the sky of the canteen ceiling.

‘That's settled then,' said Miss Kunstein and pulled her skirts around her as she glided out of the room. ‘I'll call for you when I need you. Be ready.'

T
he air was
cold and a sharp breeze blew the foulness of the river through the Community and out into the Deadlands on the other side. In the itchy late afternoon, Carter stood there, replaying Lucia's words in his head.

‘Go to the Barricades,' he said to himself. There was something else she'd said before the strange words. Something had struck a chord in him so old and so deep. He sliced through the memories he'd remembered when he first came out from the Catacombs, the things that had slid their way through the freeze to the front of his cortex.

His last thought underground had been about the going-away party; the FreeScreen lightshow against the white brick facia of the recreation centre, spitting multicoloured lights out at the sky, creating spinning circles of iridescent greens and yellows, mesmerising the crowd. Hundreds of people had been there, many of them going away at the same time as him, with their friends and families.

Carter loved the going-away parties. He'd been to two before his own. They were relatively rare but grandiose affairs organised by the Industry. The rarely used recreation space was opened up and invitations distributed through the personal information cards on the same day that the call-ups were announced. Carter's entire Academy class had been invited and most of them had been there, along with their guests.

Along each side of the recreation centre there were trays of different types of synthetic foods; chicker, boeuf, duckler, carrotina and the best kinds of sweet fauclate that hardly ever came in the food baskets. Carter hadn't seen any for years—until the night of his going-away party. He just loved the sweet, soft way that fauclate melted in his mouth and got stuck in-between his teeth. It was delicious and a perfect reason to celebrate at a going-away party—because there was always a lot of it.

H
e hadn't seen
Iseult arrive or at any point during the lightshow but he had seen her at the fauclate tables with Professor Mendoza, picking her way through the different flavours and licking her fingers, the golden red threads of her hair reflecting in the lights. As he approached the table, the professor put her arm around Carter's shoulders, guiding them both to the quiet still of the shadows.

‘I'm proud of you,' she said. ‘And so would your parents be.'

Carter remembered the way the professor had looked at him. It was with strange, almost maternal care as he held him tight into her shoulder.

‘You want to be Controller General, don't you?' she said.

‘Of course I do.'

‘And you know I promised your parents and your grandfather I would do everything in my power to ensure that you fulfilled your potential.'

Carter nodded.

‘And that you can trust me and the Industry with your life.'

Carter nodded again. ‘Of course,' he said. The professor was the closest to a mother he'd had since his parents had died.

P
rofessor Mendoza pulled
something small and yellow from the pocket of her shirt. ‘You can give yourself a head start you know,' she said and gestured towards Iseult. The girl had stopped laughing and was drawing with her fingers in the open sky.

‘What do you mean?' said Carter.

‘A prolific Controller General is a good example to others. You know…' Professor Mendoza stopped for a second. ‘You know the reason I wasn't chosen was because I didn't—I couldn't be the example that you need to be. It wasn't my Contribution. It was about…' Her voice trailed off into the darkness. ‘My babies weren't what they wanted,' she said. ‘They were like Silas.'

The girl shivered in the moonlight, her fingers moving more quickly high in the sky, tracing the outline of the stars. Carter looked at her spirals of red hair, waving in the breeze.

‘You want me to…do it? Here? Now?'

‘Your test results came to me, Carter. Your genetics are perfect. And strong. Here.' Professor Mendoza handed him a small white pill. ‘They will give you another of these tomorrow to help with the relaxation of your memory muscles—it reduces the dreaming whilst you are asleep. Take one now and you'll feel nothing, remember little.' Carter nodded.

‘You know what you need to do, don't you, Carter Warren?' she said.

The girl smiled nervously.

‘It will help you tremendously if you can have made a contribution in this way whilst you are underground. There are no guarantees, of course, but this is the best I could get you at short notice.' She pushed the girl forwards. ‘Such a shame that Isabella was… well, let's forget about her. I'm sure you'll soon get past that.'

S
he handed
a pill to the girl, doused in fauclate, and produced a container of water. Iseult's arms and legs were long and spindly, like a carefully crafted tree, and her skin the colour of sun-bleached nutshells. She took the pill quickly, crunched between cloud white jagged teeth. There was a nod from the professor, a sliver of a moon, a thin slit of sliver and a calm, cool breeze and then Professor Mendoza was gone.

Then it was just the two of them and the sound of twigs crackling as they fell beneath a pine tree and his lips met hers in a vibrant embrace. It happened quickly and was over in seconds. The memory jarred with him. There was something else, something imperfectly intact and as cloudy as a dull day.

And then it hit him—something so painful and dead sick that it speared the smile and twisted it to a grimace. As the sadness hit him, he stumbled and fell, crouching in the trees with his arms around his heart and a sharp stabbing in his stomach. Isabella had been watching him and the girl from the side of the building: the cream-haired, sparkly Isabella of his Academy days.

‘Carter,' she called. ‘Don't do it. Please.' His mouth opened and closed on the words but nothing came from his mouth. Iseult got to her feet and disappeared into the darkness. He had watched the tears streaming down Isabella's face that was darkened with anger and distress and she mouthed three words through the darkness at him.

‘I love you.'

A
nd then
, Carter realised, he couldn't remember anything more of that evening. He didn't remember anything at all until he was sat in the Catacombs, watching the countdown of the clock.

As he recalled the way the numbers flashed in front of his eyes, there was one other thing he did remember—something that came back to him in a terrifying blur, but with absolute clarity. Carter remembered what it was he had seen that day with his father in the cottage of Isabella's uncle, the Delaney House.

I
n the cold
afternoon light of Proclamation Plaza, as he watched Iseult trail into the distance, her words still rung in his ears.
Bad people
. And Carter knew that he had to talk to Isabella about what had happened—before it was too late.

J
onah's new mother
, Helen Hatherall, was the first suicide on Level seven. There were others that Alice found out about through Kunstein but, apparently there were less than had been expected. Jonah had turned up to class dry-eyed although Billie-Joe, hysterical, had been excused for the day.

‘I didn't see anything,' said Jonah, eyes fixed to the floor. ‘They took her away before, you know, it happened. They don't have proper funerals here—they just push them off the edge of the Ship.'

‘How did she...?' said Alice but then wasn't sure exactly that she wanted to know. Jonah shrugged his shoulders.

‘I didn't see anything,' he repeated. ‘The people who came for her said that she poisoned herself, but they didn't say how or with what.' His eyes clouded over with a dull, lifeless sediment and his bottom lip started to shake. ‘I didn't even like her,' he continued, ‘but she was all I had.'

‘Will they,' Alice hesitated for a second, ‘will they send you another new mother?'

‘I don't know. Maybe. I suppose someone will need to take care of Billie-Jo—and George can't do it. He couldn't even take care of his own wife.'

Alice sat on the floor next to Jonah.

‘It's harder for some people,' she said. ‘They just can't deal with it. It's easier for us—we had less to lose, I suppose.' Jonah looked up at her, his eyes burning with anger.

‘It might have been easier for you but none of this is easy for me. All I want to do is run around in the park or kick a football or ride my bike. I hate this stupid place, it drives me mad. I think I'm the only one who cares what things used to be like. Everyone's getting on with things like it's normal to eat that rubbish and live with people you don't even know. I feel like the only crazy person.'

‘We're all mad here,' said Alice. ‘Every one of us'

I
n the months that followed
, there were at least twenty more suicides that Alice heard about: all adults over thirty. And even she knew that there were probably more. The leadership team at Paradigm Industries, or The Industry as they became known on board the Ship, did everything they could to make the situation better but, as Alice realised, there were some shipmates that just weren't suited to life on the open seas. She sometimes wondered whether it might not have been better for the name
the Ship
to have been
the Submarine
, buried deep in the cornerstones of the earth, but
the Ship
, for some reason, was what stuck.

Life became a regular rhythm of ups and downs. Education was intense and structured and, in contrast to Alice's previous experiences, absolutely compulsory. She learned the practical skills of survival: food and nutrition; how to extract the minerals from the earth to create energy; how to create synthetic compounds and transform them into materials; and, most importantly, the politics of management.

‘You will make a great leader in the new world,' said Miss Kunstein. ‘You are a fast learner and you have the adaptive skills to make our good people great. You will achieve things beyond your wildest imaginings.'

Alice nodded. And as much as she wasn't sure about Jonah's adaptability, by the time they had been underground for eighteen months, the pair had become virtually inseparable.

A
fter two years
they had almost forgotten what the smell of a fresh spring breeze on their skins felt like and, although she craved the sweet, hay smell of cut grass and the grazing sound of a skateboard on gravel, Alice loved the regularity and simplicity of life on board the Ship.

‘Sometimes I'm not sure I want this to end,' she said to Jonah one evening after classes had ended as they sat outside the classroom. His hair, tousled over to one side, only half-covered the disbelief that mapped across his face.

‘What do you mean?' he said. ‘I'd go crazy without the hope of getting out of here. I only live for the hope of what might be left outside.'

Alice slipped an arm around his shoulder. ‘Hope is a dangerous thing,' she said. ‘It's hope that got us into this mess in the first place. Instead of doing something about the planet, about wars, about the madness, people just hoped things would improve. Hope doesn't make things better; hope just stops people from acting. It's like the lottery—you remember the lottery?'

Jonah nodded. ‘But the lotteries gave people a chance, right? They gave people the chance to win their way out of poverty—that has to be a good thing.'

Alice clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

‘Wrong,' she said decisively. ‘It stopped people from trying harder to achieve. All that hope was a waste of energy and a waste of time. My mother was a hoper—look where that got her.'

T
hey sat there
, backs against the cool metal of lockers in the Academy room. At times, Alice thought she could feel a breeze of cool air wafting through the corridors, scented with the ideas of a past life that she had almost forgotten about. There were things she missed: Charlie Davenport and his moist nose; the smell of candy floss; wet pavements that reflected rainbows; and occasionally the sound of her father's voice. She could hardly remember what that sounded like anymore. And she hated herself for it. Every time she tried so hard to hear his deep, treacle-sounding voice inside her head, it turned into the crisp, cruel tones of Hutchinson, barking orders that felt like a hard thumb pressing into her bruises.

But most of what she missed had started long before going underground. Cool summer nights in the garden, the way grass felt underneath her skin and riding a bike—they had all gone years before. And the weirdest part was that the longer she was on board the Ship, the less she missed them.

She interlaced her fingers with Jonah's and, as he turned to face her, his lips bruised hers. Gently and without definition but in a way that made her stomach feel full of glitter and her eyes go dizzy.

‘I think I might love you,' he said. ‘Despite your crazy ideas, I don't think I could get through this without you.' Then he kissed her again, this time deeply and with all the weight of the world above them pressed onto her lips.

Alice held his hand tightly as the delicate beauty of the silence enveloped them.

S
ometime in the third year
, Miss Kunstein became Kunstein. Along with many other things, the titles that had once demarked the outlines of gender melted into the distant past like smoke in the sunset.

Alice and Jonah became known as a couple, although they never spoke about it to anyone. Alice wasn't even sure how she would explain the fact that there was a safeness in the nostalgia of her old life that she felt with Jonah that she didn't feel anywhere else on board the Ship. How she would explain that one night, before the curfew, they had found an old store room and danced to a tune they hummed themselves. They danced awkwardly with hands on shoulders and around waists from films they'd seen when they were children. When they'd finished dancing, they melted into each other for a moment and cried together. They never spoke about it, and it never happened again.

O
n what she
thought might have been her fifteenth birthday, Kunstein took Alice into the control room that squatted twenty floors below the residential areas of the Ship, buried deep in the bowels of the core structure. As the lessons started back after lunch, Kunstein clipped open the hidden lift doors that Alice had seen in her first week on board the Ship and they stepped into the glass box that smelled of diesel and dried flowers, and nothing like the smoke-filled and urine-stained elevator that rarely worked in Prospect House.

They slipped downwards so quickly that the jolt snatched the breath from Alice's lungs and, as the vanilla and lavender circulated through her senses, she believed that it might have been the most beautiful scent in the world. Without realising, she clung to the skirts of Kunstein's ample black cloak and held herself against the wall of the lift tightly, scared of what might come next. But as the doors opened, and she saw the corridors bustling with the Industry scientists, she felt calm, different even.

Kunstein directed her through the corridors and into a side room that led around the edge of the Ship and then back towards the middle. She tapped a code into the next door and led Alice through.

‘Security,' she said, and as Alice stepped into the shell of the room that took up almost the whole level and was vaster than any other on the Ship, she realised that Kunstein had brought her to the control room. It gleamed and whirred with metallic brilliance.

‘Would you like some tea?' said Kunstein, offering her a tall cup of something that smelled strangely similar to coffee.

‘No, thank you,' said Alice and looked around at the walls while Kunstein sipped the odd liquid that frothed over the edges of the flask.

‘
W
hat exactly am
I looking for?' said Alice as they pored over monitors, dials and switches that covered the whole of one wall of the cavernous room. For the first time in years, Alice realised she was looking at something that was happening outside of the Ship. Kunstein kept her eyes fixed to the screens as they sat there together in silence, the only noise the quiet clicking and shushing of the machinery that kept the sunken craft in operation. Alice thought that she could almost feel the floor moving. Kunstein pointed to the screens and traced her finger around the shapes and colours.

‘Here,' she said. ‘Look here.' A whirl of colour glided past the main screen on a background of dark blue and black.

‘Why me?' said Alice, ‘why would you show all this to me and not someone with more experience? There must be engineers, mechanics, scientists, bankers—all kinds of people here on the Ship, but you're showing me. I don't understand.' Kunstein smiled at her.

‘That is exactly why,' she said. ‘We can use those people's skills, believe me. But what would they want to do when they got out there?'

Alice thought for a second.

‘They would use their skills to build everything back up from scratch,' she said. ‘Start again, recreate, develop. Make everything real again.' Kunstein pointed to one of the screens; it was barely recognisable as the inside of a supermarket. Alice remembered Mr Shah's neat rows of tin cans and overpriced, wiped clean vegetables. She wondered if he made it back up North. And what up North might be like now and whether people were as mad as bats.

‘Exactly,' said Kunstein. ‘And how would that help people? Not at all. They have become used to things as they are in here. They would never be able to adapt to that level of complexity again—assuming we could even recreate it in that way. And, by the way, we couldn't. There just aren't enough of us.'

Alice laughed to herself. She didn't want anything back the way it was—
No day, No way.

‘Back to your question of
why you
—well it's not just you, Alice, that we're looking at to do this. There are others. We need people who are young, fit, flexible, smart and, above all, want things to change.
Demand
that things change. A situation like this changes people—those who lived the lives of the privileged, well, some of them are resentful and angry. Not at the Industry but at anyone who would deny them the elite position that they became accustomed to. You know, Alice,'

Kunstein flicked a few switches on the dashboard in front of her, ‘Some people will go to their banks when we get above ground and look for their money.' She laughed a deep, hefty laugh. ‘Can you imagine?'

Alice thought about the grand, marble buildings in the City, stocked with currencies of paper and metal that no longer meant anything, and smiled with a nervous uncertainty.

‘But surely, maybe, someone would swap it with them for something?'

Kunstein nodded.

‘Maybe some would. But do you understand; it doesn't mean anything anymore. And in truth, it never did. It was something we made up to trade with. But if no one has anything to trade anymore, what's the point?' Alice felt the ideas trickling around inside her brain, settling, unsettling and then concreting themselves as the conversation progressed.

‘So…' Alice watched the colours on the screens swarm around in the depths of the water in the supermarket, backlit from the camera, ‘why did we bother with money in the first place?'

Kunstein pointed to a gargantuan flippered fish that darted in between the checkouts.

‘Why, exactly,' she said.

A
ll afternoon
, Alice watched the monitors and learned how to alternate the views of the cameras across the different screens to watch the flooded city at different angles.

‘The levels are falling,' said Kunstein. ‘In the last twelve months, the water has subsided significantly. It's still not safe, but it will be.'

‘When?' said Alice, watching the still, dark depths. In the silence of the room, punctuated by light, airy clicks, it was eerie and serene. It reminded Alice of an aquarium. And it didn't look safe at all.

‘When this light,' Kunstein pointed to a solid oval button on the wall that blinked amber, ‘turns to green. It measures water level, land mass, air quality and, most importantly, radioactivity. We can't account for other things, of course, like structural safety of the buildings or what animal life may have survived, but it's a good start. We installed part of this after the Storms, you know: an ingenious piece of intelligence equipment.'

Alice nodded in agreement, although she couldn't quite be sure how accurate it was.

‘After the Storms? Did you manage to test it?' she said, watching the supermarket. There was the skeletal outline of a body on the floor, a huge rucksack on its back; or, she thought, it looked like it might have been a body at some point in the last few years.